Agenda

04 Dic 2025 11:00

Multimodal Discursive Governance and State-Building in Digital China

Online lecture series

Dezheng (William) Feng (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Multimodal discursive governance and State-Building in digital China

This talk introduces how the Chinese state harnesses convergent media platforms, such as film, documentaries, social media, and global branding campaigns, and multimodal semiotic resources including text, images, video, digital interfaces, and algorithmic curation, to construct a cohesive narrative of governance, legitimacy, and national identity in the digital age. Moving beyond traditional propaganda, China’s discursive governance has developed a sophisticated multimodal ecosystem that relies on digital aesthetics, emotional resonance, and participatory culture. For example, Main Melody Films (e.g., The Battle at Lake Changjin) combine Hollywood-style action, celebrity actors, and patriotic narratives to attract voluntary viewership. On Douyin, users and influencers create dance challenges, memes, and duets with nationalist hashtags (#我爱中国), which are amplified and turned into viral performance through algorithmic promotion, turning loyalty into viral performance. I argue that multimodal semiotics provides a useful framework to unravel the complexity of meaning making in this process, and my previous work has developed various frameworks for this purpose. In this talk, I will present an overview of the frameworks, and focus on the multimodal evaluation framework. I will use the framework to analyze documentary films and promotional films as multimodal forms of discursive governance.

Dezheng (William) Feng, PhD, is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English at the Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on the analysis of various media and communication practices from the perspectives of pragmatics, discourse analysis and multimodality. His recent publications have appeared in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Teaching and Teacher Education, Discourse and Communication, and Visual Communication. He serves as Book Review Editor of Journal of English for Academic Purposes and editorial board member of international journals such as Multimodality and Society and Designs for Learning. His monograph Multimodal Chinese Discourse: Understanding Communication and Society in Contemporary China was published by Routledge in 2023.

This event is part of the Online Lecture Series Ways of State-Building in Contemporary China, organised by Michela Bonato (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Giulia Cabras (Freie Universität Berlin); scientific referee: Prof. Luiza Anna Bialasiewicz (Ca' Foscari University of Venice).

Lingua

L'evento si terrà in inglese

Organizzatore

Centro SELISI, Department of Economics, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Freie Universität Berlin, and co-funded by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Project 101106116 — IMAT (In)visibility of Multilingualism in Amdo Tibet

Link

http://urly.it/31cj_t

Allegati

Locandina 2623 KB
Programma generale ciclo incontri 2583 KB

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